Welfare Benefits

''I do not want to be a parasite on the American people,'' Be Thi Nguyen said, her eyes glistening with tears.A survivor of the Vietnam War who endured a brutal ''re-education camp,'' the slight 57-year-old refugee wore a neck brace as she spoke to congressmen, reporters and fellow immigrants in a somber Senate office building.''I personally feel grateful and ashamed because I have to open my hands and accept SSI from this country,'' she said, referring to her Supplemental Security Income.

I'm ticked off at the thoughtless driver who scraped the back left side of my daughter's car in a library parking lot and then just drove away without leaving a note. My daughter is a college student and doesn't have the money to get the damage fixed. We hope that their car is scraped up pretty bad too! We tried to buy one fry pan from a TV pitch. While on the phone, they took the card info. Then they started to talk about the entire set of pans. We said cancel the order, no, no, no we don't want the set, only the pan. After lots of hang ups and cut offs, we found that we were charged for the first payment plus shipping and handling for the complete set. After a week, we received a large box with the full set. I would not accept the box from the package delivery driver, but he just left it at my door.

As they work to draw up Gov. George Pataki's budget for the coming year, top administration officials are urging the governor to propose a 90-day limit on welfare benefits for employable, childless recipients as well as a reduction of up to 25 percent in benefit levels for those recipients. The officials also want to eliminate grants made by the state to certain disabled people through the federal government's Supplemental Security Income program. The officials said Thursday that Pataki had not made final decisions on whether to include the proposals in his budget.

WASHINGTON — Congress will meet for only a few final days this week to enable lawmakers to campaign full time in the battle for control of Capitol Hill, leaving much business undone until after the election. The House convenes for three days to wrap up its work, while the Senate , where Democrats have the majority, is considering a similar truncated schedule. Lawmakers had initially been scheduled to work through the first week of October. The one must-pass piece of legislation — a bill to keep the government funded once the new fiscal year begins Oct.1 — is set for final approval this week in the Senate after having already cleared the House.

MOSCOW -- A thousand retired people tried to block the road to a Moscow airport Saturday as 10,000 others jammed the avenues in President Vladimir Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg to voice their anger about a law that stripped them of some key welfare benefits. It was the largest show of discontent since the Kremlin leader took power nearly five years ago.

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia -- Police clashed with hundreds of Gypsies who had gathered late Monday in a city in eastern Slovakia apparently in anger about government cuts to their welfare benefits. Some of the protesters threw rocks and glass bottles at police cars. Earlier in the day, a Gypsy leader said rallies were planned for Wednesday throughout Slovakia to show that Gypsies, also known as Romany, cannot survive on the reduced aid they are receiving from the state.

Reforming welfare in this country will take hard work and deliberation.There is one important change, though, that requires no discussion and should be made immediately. People who are fugitives from justice ought to be ineligible to receive welfare benefits.Astounding as it may seem, federal welfare rules don't bar fugitives from welfare. What's more, privacy laws restrict the exchange of information between police and welfare agencies, which don't know that some of their clients may be cited in fugitive warrants or may be parole violators.

President Bush said Tuesday he was waiving certain federal welfare rules to allow Virginia to test a new program that would link some welfare benefits to school attendance. The program is aimed at breaking welfare dependency by making education a higher priority to families receiving government assistance. ''Education and job skills are necessary for any person to become a productive member of society,'' Bush said. Under Virginia's program children in grades six through eight, in a limited number of schools, must attend classes or their families will lose some welfare benefits.

An experimental program that ties welfare benefits to teen-agers' school attendance has resumed after a judge lifted an order suspending it because poor attendance records caused unfair penalties. Learnfare, which docks the welfare benefits of families whose teen-agers skip school, was suspended in Milwaukee County during the summer. A federal judge last week lifted the suspension after state and Milwaukee school officials reached an agreement to ensure better attendance records would be kept.

Italians had no newspapers Saturday because of a ''day of silence'' strike by journalists protesting curbs on their welfare benefits. The state broadcasting company RAI said it planned to transmit only two radio and two television news reports. The one-day strike of newspaper, radio and television journalists was called by their union, the National Press Federation, over a government ruling restricting the autonomy of the welfare organization that handles their social security benefits.

WASHINGTON -- Congress will meet for only a few final days this week to enable lawmakers to campaign full-time in the battle for control of Congress, leaving much business undone until after the election. The House convenes for three days to wrap up its work, while the Senate , where Democrats have the majority, is considering a similar truncated schedule. Lawmakers had initially been scheduled to work through the first week of October. The one must-pass piece of legislation – a bill to keep the government funded once the new fiscal year begins, Oct.1 -- is set for final approval this week in the Senate after having already cleared the House.

The Legislature's passage of a bill requiring eligible welfare applicants in Tennessee to submit to drug testing in order to qualify for benefits isn't expected, by the state comptroller's own analysis, to save Tennessee any money in the operations of the Department of Human Services. In fact, it's expected to impose new costs of approximately $100,000 to defend against a predictable lawsuit on constitutional grounds. So if the bill has a purpose, it must be lawmakers' spite for, and mean-spirited intimidation of, welfare applicants generally -- or legislators' willingness to pander on the worst stereotype of welfare applicants, never mind the economic hardships that usually drive people to seek welfare aid. With the apparent purpose of this bill so flawed and malicious, its passage also calls into question Gov. Bill Haslam's weak agreement to sign the bill into law, as his press secretary announced Monday.

A cup of 'No' In rightly suspending Florida's policy of drug-testing welfare applicants, U.S. District Judge Mary S. Scriven took a gavel to the state's specious narrative of hordes of handout-seeking druggies. In her 37-page ruling, Scriven declared the state failed to justify an overriding need for "wholesale, suspicionless drug testifying of all applicants" for welfare benefits. In fact, early returns shoot holes in the state's justification. More than 21,000 Floridians have been cleared for benefits from July through September.

MOSCOW -- A thousand retired people tried to block the road to a Moscow airport Saturday as 10,000 others jammed the avenues in President Vladimir Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg to voice their anger about a law that stripped them of some key welfare benefits. It was the largest show of discontent since the Kremlin leader took power nearly five years ago.

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia -- Police clashed with hundreds of Gypsies who had gathered late Monday in a city in eastern Slovakia apparently in anger about government cuts to their welfare benefits. Some of the protesters threw rocks and glass bottles at police cars. Earlier in the day, a Gypsy leader said rallies were planned for Wednesday throughout Slovakia to show that Gypsies, also known as Romany, cannot survive on the reduced aid they are receiving from the state.

Mr. Bush's welfare-reform plan also calls for spending $300 million to promote marriage. Matrimony is a worthy goal, but government doesn't need to play matchmaker. Despite a high correlation between single motherhood and poverty, marriage should never be a pre-condition for welfare benefits. Mothers might be pressured into marrying abusive boyfriends, or staying in bad marriages. Government should not set up disincentives for marriage, but it shouldn't be in the business of promoting it. That's a job better left to families and churches.

Food stamps and welfare benefits in New York and the six New England states will be distributed electronically with a plastic credit card under a $200 million deal announced Monday. The states hope to eliminate fraud and cut administrative costs by turning to the new system, which will allow welfare recipients to get benefits through automatic teller machines at banks. The Chicago-based Citibank EBT Services was granted the seven-year contract to run the system. The change will affect 1.4 million people receiving food stamps.

With only minor opposition from Democrats, members of a House panel agreed Tuesday to eliminate most welfare benefits for immigrants who are not U.S. citizens. Action came in the House Ways and Means subcommittee on human resources, which is rewriting most of the nation's welfare laws. The panel's work could be completed today, setting the stage for action before the full committee in about two weeks. The GOP-sponsored bill would prohibit states from providing 35 different federally financed benefits, including Medicaid, to most noncitizens.

Many years ago, I asked my father how a citizen determined whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. My dad, who had no formal education, responded with, "If you are a worker, earning a salary, you are a Democrat, and if you own a business, hiring workers, you are a Republican." At the time, I dismissed his answer as simplistic. Well, more than half a century later, my dad's answer doesn't seem too far off the mark. In today's political climate, each candidate attempts to cloud my dad's clear dividing line in order to lure voters to his camp.

By John H. Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson Special to the Sentinel, February 27, 2000

When Congress enacted welfare-reform legislation in 1996, it abolished the federal entitlement to cash benefits for dependent families under the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program and directed each of the 50 states to design their own program to replace it. Perhaps no two states resemble each other more closely than Minnesota and Wisconsin. Among other things, each has a population of about five million; each is dominated by a single metropolitan area; and each has a long-standing, progressive political tradition.